This piece is a collaboration between me and Carolyn Witte, the founder of Tia and a relentless advocate for women’s health. Carolyn just launched her women’s health newsletter, the XX Factor. Together, we wanted to dig deeper into something we’ve both witnessed firsthand: a funding cliff women’s health companies face when they “grow up” and hit a wall.

It is no secret that women’s health presents an enormous, and still largely untapped opportunity (you can read about it in the recent WHAM report here). But this isn’t an article about that. It’s about what happens after your first few venture rounds—once you have a real product and business out in the world and need big dollars to scale.

While raising a Seed or Series A round in women’s health is getting (a little) easier, raising anything beyond that is still an uphill battle. Startups in this category face a critical funding gap right when they need capital the most—at the growth stage—preventing many promising companies from reaching their full potential.

We partnered with Rock Health to dig into the data. Our analysis covered 1,005 U.S. digital health deals from 2023 to 2024, comparing the women’s health slice to the broader category. For this research, women's health encompasses digital health solutions (not biotech) addressing the health needs of cisgender women, as well as transgender and nonbinary individuals with related health needs. This includes: menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, postpartum care, sexual and reproductive health, fertility support, behavioral health, exercise, nutrition, cancer prevention, and other services specifically for this population.

The data confirmed our hunch: women's health companies aren’t just underrepresented—they’re under-capitalized at the growth stage, exactly the moment when capital matters most.

This results in fewer scaled women’s health companies, fewer comps, and fewer exits. It’s a vicious cycle that holds the whole category back. Let’s break it down.

First, the good news: funding for the women’s health category is growing

Before we get into what’s broken, let’s acknowledge progress!

Investment in the women's health category has grown significantly since we both started. According to SVB’s recent report, women’s health saw a 55% year-over-year increase in funding in 2024, totaling nearly $1 billion. Rock Health found that women's health startups made up about 6.6% of digital health funding dollars in 2024—up from just 2.6% in 2023. These are trends we’re excited to see!

Several factors may be driving this early-stage momentum:

📍Women's health is finally "on the map.” Investors increasingly recognize the size of the market opportunity.

💼 Both generalist and specialist funds are leaning in. We’re seeing early-stage bets from established players, alongside a new wave of gender-lens and women’s health-focused funds led by emerging managers like Muse, Foreground, The Helm, and FemHealth Ventures.

📈 There are credible signals that scale is possible. Companies like Maven, Carrot, Tia, Midi, Kindbody, Progyny, Bobbie, and TMRW prove to investors that companies in this category can scale.

♀️The definition of women's health is expanding. It’s no longer just fertility and pregnancy; Investors are starting to understand that women’s health spans everything from metabolic health to menopause, mental health to autoimmune care, and more—broadening the total addressable market.

These are real, important shifts—and they’ve created a stronger pipeline of early-stage companies than ever before. But that bigger pipeline comes with a tradeoff: more competition down the line. As more startups move from concept to traction, the bottleneck at the growth stage gets tighter.

Early momentum doesn’t guarantee long-term success. Most of these companies will need follow-on capital to scale, and that’s where the cliff begins.

The vast majority of women's health deals are early stage

While momentum is real, the majority of deals in women’s health are still happening in the early stages of a company’s journey.

A striking 81% of women’s health deals in 2023–2024 (excluding bridge, debt, and unlabeled rounds) were Seed or Series A. That’s a significantly higher concentration than the broader digital health sector, where just 68% of deals fall into those early stages.

When it comes to check sizes:

Seed rounds tend to be smaller. In women’s health, the average seed round is $4.4M, compared to $6.9M in digital health overall (a 36% difference). (Note: Rock Health only tracks rounds of $2M+).
Series A rounds are more on par, with women’s health startups averaging $18.5M vs. $18.6M across the board (active progress!)

Beyond the numbers, there’s also what we hear again and again from founders: negotiating power is often limited in women’s health and is compounded by the female founder factor. Many of the funds investing in this space—especially the newer, women’s health-focused ones—are smaller and more valuation-sensitive. Some don’t have the ability to lead rounds or write larger follow-on checks, which makes it harder for founders to run competitive processes or set favorable terms.

That lack of leverage can translate into lower valuations, “party rounds” made up of lots of little checks, more investor-favorable governance provisions, and higher traction bars in order to get a deal done at all.

While we don’t have hard data on valuations, the broader trend is well-documented: women founders, on average, sell more of their companies than men. According to Carta, this equity gap persists across stages, and since 76% of women’s health companies are led by women, that reality is especially relevant here.

The result? A compounding dilution effect: smaller rounds, more equity given up, and less flexibility to raise future capital on founder-friendly terms. It’s a quiet penalty that builds over time—and holds back the very people trying to scale solutions in this space.

When women’s health startups “grow up,” the capital gap gets more dire

While women's health is growing at Seed and Series A stages, funding dramatically drops off at Series B and beyond, precisely when these companies need real fuel to scale.

Our analysis shows that women’s health deals comprise just 2.7% of digital health deals at Series B or beyond.

In fact, according to Rock Health, only five U.S.-based women's health companies raised Series B or higher during the period we studied (2023-2024). These include:

Maven: $125M Series F (employer-sponsored virtual care and benefit management for women and family health)
Midi: $63M Series B (virtual care for women 40+, focused on peri/menopause)
Pomelo Care: $46M Series B (risk-based virtual maternity and newborn care)
TMRW Life Sciences: $28M Series D (automated cryostorage platform for IVF and fertility clinics)
Bloomlife: $13M Series B (remote monitoring tools for pregnancy)

It’s a tale of two cities. A handful of women’s health companies are breaking through and raising sizable growth rounds; in 2024, Maven, Midi, Pomelo are the beacons of hope, but they remain the exception, not the norm. These outliers can give the illusion of progress, but they mask a harsher reality: for most, capital dries up just as the need to scale intensifies. The question isn’t whether breakout wins are possible—it’s why they’re so few and far between.

So, what’s behind this growth stage funding cliff? We see four interlocking forces at play:

1. A lack of women’s health comps: Growth-stage investors rely on “comps” (comparable companies) to model their potential returns. The later the stage, the more formulaic the math becomes. That’s nearly impossible in women’s health, where there are so few scaled companies and only one public comp—Progyny—which is really a benefits manager and an “apples to oranges” comparison at best. This is where being an early mover in a nascent category can be a negative instead of a positive.

2. A lack of digital health exits: Even investors willing to look outside the category for comps hit a wall. The digital health IPO window has largely been closed since 2022. Many companies that went public during the boom are underperforming or delisted (e.g. Babylon, Pear, Cue), with some notable exceptions like Hims & Hers and Doximity. Even Hinge Health’s much-anticipated IPO has been put on hold after filing its S-1 due to the current tariff-driven market volatility. With limited exit pathways, growth-stage investors are hesitant to fund new later-stage rounds in digital health as a whole.

3. Capital constraints of small funds: The rising class of smaller and women’s health-specific funds fueling many early-stage deals are largely sub-$100M funds. While we’re happy to see these funds that support early-stage companies, most lack follow-on check-writing capabilities or the ability to lead at later stages. Furthermore, these emerging fund managers need their early funds to perform well in order to be able to raise larger follow-on funds to combat this (hence, the cycle).

4. Systemic bias: The underrepresentation of women in decision-making roles in venture capital likely plays a role in who gets funded and who doesn’t. Only ~17% of check writers at U.S. VC firms are women, and the percentage drops even further at larger funds managing over $50 million. This matters because research shows that female investors are more likely to fund female-led companies.

That dynamic creates a compounding disadvantage in women’s health: most companies in the category are led by women (76%), but most capital is controlled by men. At the growth stage, where rounds are bigger, risk tolerance is lower, and check writers have more gatekeeping power, this imbalance becomes even more pronounced.

As Jenny Abramson, founder of VC firm Rethink Impact, told the New York Times, many women-led startups fall into a “valley of death” between early traction and growth stage capital—a structural funding gap that exists across sectors, but is especially acute in women’s health.

It’s part of what fueled a vocal debate around Flo Health’s $200M raise last year, led by a male-founded team and backed by male investors. While the size of the deal was a promising signal for the category, it also surfaced frustration from many who see female-led companies struggling to raise similar rounds. Our take? More capital flowing into women’s health is a net positive—regardless of who’s at the helm—but equity in access to that capital matters, too.

The billion-dollar question: where should women's health be?

Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math.

If women’s health made up just 10% of digital health funding—a reasonable benchmark given that women account for 51% of the population and control >80% of healthcare dollars—we’d expect to see something like:

~100 women’s health deals per year (not 49 across two years)
~$1.5B+ in annual investment (vs. ~$700M today)
A healthier mix of companies raising not just Seed and Series A rounds, but B, C, and beyond

More capital at every stage → more scaled companies → more comps and exits → more returns for investors → more capital recycled back into women’s health. That’s the flywheel we want to build.

But it won’t build itself.

So, how do we bridge the growth stage gap?

There are no quick fixes here, but here’s where we believe we can start:

🎊 Celebrate the breakouts. Every company that breaks through the growth-stage cliff is helping build the blueprint. Their success expands what’s seen as possible—and investable. Let’s cheer them all on.

📊 Keep sharing the data. Women’s health founders have faced this growth stage cliff in silence. It’s not “in their heads”—it’s in the numbers too.

🤗 Support the ecosystem. Organizations like Rock Health, Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM), All Raise, and others are doing the work to drive capital, research, and visibility into this space. They need ongoing support.

✍🏼 Get more women writing big checks. Not just at women-focused funds, but at growth-stage firms, which tend to have fewer female GPs. Lived experience matters. When investors have a personal connection to the problem space—whether as patients, caregivers, or parents—they’re more likely to recognize the value of a solution. That doesn’t mean that only women should invest in women’s health, but greater representation can change the conversation in an investment committee and help combat the unconscious bias that still shapes who and what gets funded.

🔄 Break the “one-and-done” mindset. Too often, we hear investors say they’ve “already made their women’s health bet.” Imagine if someone said, “I already made my SaaS bet!” We need to normalize—and celebrate—investors who back multiple, adjacent players in women’s health (say, a maternity care startup and a menopause platform). Women benefit from having more choices in the market. So do the founders who get to scale, and the investors who back them. Treating women’s health like a box to be checked undercuts the plethora of women’s needs and the scale of the market opportunity.

We’d love to hear from you: What’s been your experience with the growth-stage cliff? Whether you’re a founder, funder, or operator, what barriers have you seen—and what bright spots give you hope?

Drop a comment, share your story, or pass this along to someone who needs to read it. The more voices we bring to the table, the faster we can break the cycle and propel the category forward for all.

There’s a Growth-Stage Cliff Plaguing Women’s Health Startups